Earthworms :: Spring Nature Study - Eva Varga

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while.  We met with our Roots & Shoots group on the 24th of May for a springtime focus on Earthworms & Cattails.  Three families joined us despite the overcast and cold afternoon.  The sketch here is from Sweetie’s nature journal.  I was delighted to discover that she also wrote the month and day in Chinese!  I’ve been trying to encourage her to write more in both languages … my efforts are finally coming to fruition and she is getting more comfortable in both.

The kids loved the earthworms but were less fascinated by the cattails.  My kiddos and I had previously done a winter cattail study at the same location but this time around all of the heads of the cattail were absent – as though they’d all been broken off.  We thereby opted to look at the stem and roots but I didn’t have a shovel so did my best to pull one up, breaking it off partially below ground.  Alas, that didn’t provide much but we were able to see that the leaves were white below ground (no chloropasts) and in fact we could distinctly see the individual cells.  Unfortunately, no one sketched our cattail observations.